Ecological Restoration Alliance of Botanic Gardens

The United Nations has set a target to restore 15 per cent of the world's degraded ecosystems by 2020. Botanic gardens around the world have responded to the UN’s challenge by joining together to form the Ecological Restoration Alliance of Botanic Gardens (ERA), with the objective of sharing their skills, resources and plant materials to scale up restoration activities around the world.

The ERA will build capacity for restoration, including by setting up 100 demonstration sites that restore degraded areas, provide training, and communicate the value of adopting a science-based approach to ecological restoration. Demonstration sites will span a broad range of ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, temperate woodlands, grasslands, Mediterranean scrub, beaches and wetlands.

In January 2018, a four-day training course on forest restoration and plant identification took place at Brackenhurst Botanic Garden, a member of the Ecological Restoration Alliance of Botanic Gardens (ERA).